Overview: Communications Strategy

For content curators, adding a CuratorBot on Facebook Messenger is a no-brainer. The alpha testing launched in late December was useful, resulting in a whole bunch of tweaks, as described in this post for Chatbot Magazine.

The European Training Foundation asked a partner and I to help them map out a digital transformation strategy. Through running workshops and interviewing staff in a highly structured process, we are currently developing actionable change management recommendations to steer them towards a more efficient and innovative use of digital tools. The proj…

An average post in the private subscribers group ... attracts about twice the number of comments ...

what more than 12,000 people[i] told us about comment sections on 20 different news sites.... 81% ... would like it if journalists clarified factual questions in the comment section... 73% ... would like it if experts on the topic of the article responded... 58%, would like it if journalists actively contributed to comment sections...

Find influencers, and partner with them to create Youtility content that helps people make better decisions about their home, auto, boat, motorcycle, etc. But at the operational level, this kind of program creates a number of questions, starting with, “What influencers do we want to work with, and why?”

A commonplace book is a central resource or depository for ideas, quotes, anecdotes, observations and information you come across during your life and didactic pursuits. The purpose of the book is to record and organize these gems for later use in your life, in your business, in your writing, speaking or whatever it is that you do.

real dialogue seems to have given way to parallel monologues, paired with an inability to actively listen... Rhetoric teaches the art of using persuasive tools... resolving disagreement through measured agreeable discussion, known as the dialectic method... In 1922... "communication can by itself create a community". This early definition was clo…

When someone tries to correct you... it backfires and strengthens those misconceptions ... the backfire effect makes you less skeptical of those things that allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper... exerting effort dealing with the cognitive dissonance produced by conflicting evidence, we actually end up buildin…

the surest way of defeating the erroneous views of others is not by bombarding the bastion of their self-righteousness but by slipping in through the backdoor of their beliefs... People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others... Pascal frames persuas…

Most people in the news industry hate comments.... yet audience engagement ... is so worth the investment ... trust in media and journalists has sunk to a new low. Talking to each other can help build relationships and therefore trust. What business leader out there doesn’t want to earn more per user? And what journalist doesn’t want to have the b…

There’s large-scale, statistically significant research into the impact of search results on political views... Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better... people are finally saying, ‘Gee, Facebook and Google really have a lot of power’ like it’s this big revelation. And it’s like, ‘D’oh.’”…

Major enterprise stories — stories that take deep dives and attempt to inform readers in substantive ways or to elicit impact... require considerable resources... the potential audience is limited... how can journalists get readers to complete these long pieces?use multiple elements and platforms to tell the story... the parts that pull your reade…

Propaganda warfare is increasingly shaping narratives, policies and lives around the world.

these efforts seek to produce a divided electorate and a president with no clear mandate to govern. The ultimate objective is to diminish and tarnish American democracy... We’ve monitored more than 7,000 social media accounts over the last 30 months and at times engaged directly with them. Trump isn’t the end of Russia’s social media and hacking …

the evidence of this orchestrated Russian intelligence effort to hack the outcome of the American election... seems flimsy at best... saying is that Russia took advantage of the social web’s desire to just share things without reading them. It may be true, but so does every other media outlet.

Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood...two people together can mutua…

Seven years ago I started working full time at the Guardian in the glamorous role of SEO editorial executive. ... very like being in the Matrix but with less kung fu and more Polly Toynbee and Nigel Farage... here are a few of the things I’ve learned…

Let’s take a break from the Donald, Facebook and the end of democracy, and try to focus on what’s important.

Their job is to navigate the world of information, help scholars and students get what they need, and distinguish good information from bad. They’ve faced their own technological disruptions, and have responded by developing a set of principles to help their public assess the credibility of information and use it ethically. They call this framewor…

Raising Barriers... took readers to eight countries across three continents and examined the divisions between countries and peoples through interwoven words, video and sound... we used every multimedia tool in our arsenal. Here’s what we learned from the experience

hierarchy of good writing, particularly of good science writing... Explainers make information clear and comprehensible... Elucidators go beyond explanation and into illumination — they transmute information into understanding by ... integrating various bits of knowledge into a larger framework of comprehension... Enchanters do all of the above, b…

I finally vlogged my first event. Some first impressions.

where curated broadcast channels shine and it’s easier than ever to search for live videos

people comment 10 times more on Facebook Live videos than on regular videos... we wanted to highlight some of the recent trends and themes we’ve seen emerge... Local reporters often have devoted fans who are interested in viewing their authentic Facebook Live content. Certain news content resonates...

This updates both my earlier Taming the Firehose and Where is social media taking you in 2016? posts, and better aligns my productivity process with my personal content strategy.

using Facebook to repackage some of its magazine stories into video form... takes advantage of a Facebook tool that lets publishers merge a series of photos into videos... kept things simple... roughly 30 seconds and rarely going beyond a few words, a chart, or a photo in each individual slide... take as little as two minutes

A content marketing framework... allows you to develop a process that can be duplicated... repeatable framework for any type of content to be better utilized... incorporate goal setting at the beginning... an understanding from goal setting to how you’re going to put that into a strategy ... Once you publish ... get feedback and optimize the conte…

Reaching consensus with groups larger than 5 people on any other platform or service is a pain. Discuto helps you get everyone on the same page.Discuto highlights controversies and suggests where to dive in the conversation, making the decision process easier to manage. What's more is that it only takes a few seconds to set up your first discussio…

two products, Springboard and Time Inc. Connect to help editors source content from contributors, some for traditional editorial content and some for native or branded content... a way for editors to create more content around specific topics or events rather than just getting content on the cheap... gathering ... people with some degree of social…

Far from disappearing, human curation and sensibilities have a new value in the age of algorithms... Facebook is mired in a series of controversies about the curation of its news feed... recently tried to smooth the process out by firing its human editors … only to find the news feed degenerated into a mass of fake and controversial news stories.…